Chris Hedges: The Prison-Industrial Complex

On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses mass incarceration with prison reform advocates Walter Fortson and Boris Franklin. From the school-to-prison pipeline, to solitary confinement, to preventing recidivism, they reflect on their own experiences to address how to fix one of the major civil rights issues of today. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the business of locking people up.

The truth is very strong medicine. This is a most repellent but necessary issue. Facing these repulsive facts is hard for anyone with a shred of decency or social conscience. It is a waking nightmare.

The implications are simply staggering, gargantuan in two key respects.

In the first place it reveals to those of us with access to facts, whether we are US citizens or residents or neither, the scale of social atrocity in the USA.

In the second instance, it reveals the moral bankruptcy of a constitutional government that has sold out to the crony despotism of plutocratic racist tyrants ~ a species of hereditary dynastic compact, deeply embedded within an oligopolistic financial system that eclipses the natural order in order to outlaw humanity itself.

Consider this: the American “neoliberal” system has actually made it impossible for a just polity to emerge. These effects are felt, not just domestically within the jurisdiction of the USA, but globally.

It is actually hard to put into words the degree of debasement, to which US society has acquiesced ~ ‘progressively’ …although it would be more accurate to say ‘regressively…’ post-FDR, since the Japanese nuclear holocaust and the horror of Vietnam.

We can track and record and follow this sequential generational decline throughout the cold-war years, more recently from the time of the reunification of Germany and Reagan’s urban red-lining policy; but we cannot stand apart from it.

We are all in some sense responsible, because the US is such an international (triumphalist) brand that influences all of global society, principally through its post WW2 alliances & ‘free enterprise’ mantra.

So long as we remain silent and submissive, we are complicit in our own diminution by conceding to our indoctrinated impotence.

The Golden Rule

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another ... the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study.” - Rabbi Hillel

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

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